windows "n edition" - Google Search"The N editions of Windows 7 allow you to choose your own media player and software required to manage and play CDs, DVDs, and other digital media files. If you choose to use Windows Media Player 12, downloading it, along with related software, is free."

“It’s not just the sci-fi community envisioning a world where machines take over. It’s a concern among some prominent visionaries, including a group that just shelled out nearly $7 million for research into potential ill effects of artificial intelligence.”

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Bosun"is an open-source, MIT licensed, monitoring and alerting system by Stack Exchange. It has an expressive domain specific language for evaluating alerts and creating detailed notifications. It also lets you test your alerts against history for a faster development experience.

...Runs on Linux, Windows, Mac, or any operating system supported by Go (lang)

$19Protontiny Wi-Fi development kit for creating connected projects and products for the Internet of Things.

Particle P0 Wi-Fi module

Broadcom BCM43362 Wi-Fi chip

STM32F205 120Mhz ARM Cortex M3

1MB flash, 128KB RAM

802.11b/g/n

Soft AP setup

FCC/CE/IC certified

$39 Electron is a tiny development kit for creating cellular-connected electronics projects and products. It comes with a SIM card and an affordable data plan for low-bandwidth things. Plus it's available for more than 100 countries worldwide!

"Microsoft has formally released the official RTM builds for the Visual Studio 2015 family of products. This release marks Microsoft’s renewed focus on providing its best efforts in delivering a tool that can support application development across all major application platforms including iOS and Android in addition to the familiar Windows family of products."

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

New 'blue marble' picture delights - BBC News"A new, full snapshot of our planet has been captured by a Nasa satellite.Such images, which show the Earth in its entirety, are known as "Blue Marbles".The latest of these was captured by the US DISCOVR earth observation satellite, which was launched in February this year."

"Azure Data Catalog is a collaborative tool for all stakeholders that registers data sources, which it can annotate. The annotations are visible to other collaborators. Registration extracts the structural metadata from the data source and stores it in the cloud-based Catalog, while the data itself remains in the data source."

Saturday, July 18, 2015

CQRSMartin Fowler"CQRS stands for Command Query Responsibility Segregation. It's a pattern that I first heard described by Greg Young. At its heart is the notion that you can use a different model to update information than the model you use to read information. For some situations, this separation can be valuable, but beware that for most systems CQRS adds risky complexity

The mainstream approach people use for interacting with an information system is to treat it as a CRUD datastore. By this I mean that we have mental model of some record structure where we can create new records,read records, update existing records, and delete records when we're done with them. In the simplest case, our interactions are all about storing and retrieving these records."

"Command–query separation (CQS) is a principle of imperativecomputer programming...It states that every method should either be a command that performs an action, or a query that returns data to the caller, but not both. In other words, Asking a question should not change the answer.[1] More formally, methods should return a value only if they are referentially transparent and hence possess no side effects."

Friday, July 17, 2015

Ludicrous Mode will cost $10,000 for new buyers and be available as a $5,000 upgrade to those who already own the current highest-performance Model S, the P85D.Tesla's New 'Ludicrous Mode' Makes the Model S a Supercar | WIREDTesla will offer “ludicrous mode” on the X. Accounting for the increased curb weight and higher center of gravity, the 0 to 60 mph time will be about 3.3 seconds. Which, as Musk rightly says, is “mad for an SUV.

"Go has the usual mechanisms for control flow: if, for, switch, goto. It also has the go statement to run code in a separate goroutine. Here I'd like to discuss some of the less common ones: defer, panic, and recover.

A defer statement pushes a function call onto a list. The list of saved calls is executed after the surrounding function returns. Defer is commonly used to simplify functions that perform various clean-up actions."

Friday, July 10, 2015

"Active Directory Explorer (AD Explorer) is an advanced Active Directory (AD) viewer and editor. You can use AD Explorer to easily navigate an AD database, define favorite locations, view object properties and attributes without having to open dialog boxes, edit permissions, view an object's schema, and execute sophisticated searches that you can save and re-execute."

Adrian Cockcroft on Microservices and DevOps @ InfoQ"Inter-Service communication very important to understand and know the timings. XML - 500 ms; JSON - 50 ms; Google Protocol Buffers ; Thrift; AVRO; What is AVRO? Is the main process used by NetFlix for communication. Very fast."

Friday, July 03, 2015

The storage tipping point"Storage is at a tipping point: much of the existing investment in the software stack will be obsolete within two years. This will be the biggest change in storage since the invention of the disk drive by IBM in 1956.

This is not to deprecate the other seismic forces of flash, object storage, cloud and the newer workloads that are driving investment in scale-out architectures and no-SQL databases. But the 50 years of I/O stack development – based on disks and, later, RAID – is essentially obsolete today, as will become obvious to all very soon....Storage is the most critical and difficult problem in information technology. In the next decade new storage technologies will enable a radical rethink and simplification of the I/O stack beyond what flash has already done."

"the performance optimization technologies of the last decade – log structured file systems, coalesced writes, out-of-place updates and, soon, byte-addressable NVRAM – are conflicting with similar-but-different techniques used in SSDs and arrays. The software we use is written for dumb storage; we’re getting smart storage; but smart+smart = fragmentation, write amplification, and over-consumption."